WASHINGTON — As the United States starts exporting more of its natural gas, prices will firm, producers will profit, big gas consumers won’t be happy about paying more and opponents of fracking will object.

All that was apparent even before the U.S. Department of Energy released a study on gas exports Wednesday that found, on balance, a net economic benefit for the country.

In North Texas and across the state, however, these conclusions are more tangible to the many businesses and neighborhoods that interact with natural gas formations like the Barnett Shale.

Low prices have dropped drilling in the Barnett, which is centered in Tarrant County, by more than 80 percent over the last four years. Natural gas exports to hungry markets in Asia could rejuvenate Barnett drillers and bring more of Dallas face to face with the consequences.

“Anything that depletes the oversupply of natural gas should improve the price domestically, of course,” said Gene Powell, publisher and editor of Powell Shale Digest in Fort Worth. “We can get triple or more of the [U.S.] price for exports.”

Powell said the number of rigs drilling in the Barnett Shale was 196 a month in 2008, when gas prices were as high as a Las Vegas housing bubble. Last month, the rig count in the Barnett was 36. The price of gas closed Wednesday at $3.41 per million British thermal units, a measure of heat content that is roughly equal to 1,000 cubic feet of gas. That price is just a fourth of the 2008 peak.

The report on gas exports (www.fossil.energy.gov/programs/gasregulation/reports/nera_lng_report.pdf), done for the Energy Department by Washington-based NERA Consulting, said the more natural gas that is exported, the more the economy gains.

“In all of these cases, benefits that come from export expansion more than outweigh the losses from reduced capital and wage income to U.S. consumers,” the report concluded. “This is exactly the outcome that economic theory describes when barriers to trade are removed.”

Consumer complaints

Big gas consumers, such as the petrochemical industry along the Texas Gulf Coast, complained that higher gas prices would hurt their business expansion plans.

“If DOE [the Department of Energy] accepts these findings, which I think are grossly misleading, and just allows unfettered exports, Texas would see a substantial amount of manufacturing investments jeopardized,” said Dow Chemical vice president George Blitz.

Dow has announced five new plants or expansions at its mammoth petrochemicals complex in Freeport.

The federal Energy Information Administration’s chief, Adam Sieminski, said Wednesday that higher gas prices, caused at least in part by exports, are expected to revive coal use in power plants over the next two decades. But he said the agency’s latest outlook to 2040 shows natural gas use rising among manufacturers, power companies and trucking firms because of its relative abundance and competitive price.

There are big new natural gas plays in several parts of the country, from California to New York, and from North Dakota to Texas. All of them became attractive because of hydraulic fracturing combined with horizontal drilling, an approach perfected in the Barnett by oilman George Mitchell.

But as production rose, prices slumped. Drillers started looking for gas plays that contained more “wet gas” containing products like ethane, propane and butane that can fetch crude oil prices. Others took the rigs and drilling techniques to oil plays in West Texas’ Permian Basin, the Eagle Ford Shale near San Antonio, the Bakken Formation in North Dakota and the Marcellus Shale in Pennsylvania.

Barnett Shale gas is known as “dry gas,” with few associated liquids. It’s what homeowners burn for heat. It’s also what gas exporters would want to send to Asia aboard superchilled tanker ships as liquefied natural gas.

The Barnett Shale made Tarrant County the leading gas producer in the country. It made Fort Worth “the biggest gas-producing city in the world,” Powell said. Much of that was the result of drilling by Fort Worth’s XTO Energy, which was acquired by Exxon Mobil Corp. in 2009. The deal made Exxon Mobil the largest gas producer in the nation.

Steady production

Gas companies are drilling fewer wells in the Barnett, but production has remained steady at nearly 5 billion cubic feet per day — about 8 percent of U.S. production.

Exxon Mobil has asked the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission for a permit to export gas from Sabine Pass, at the southeast tip of Texas.

The Obama administration has wavered on the issue. Apart from permits for clean air, water and land use, natural gas exports are reviewed to see if they are in the national interest. (Gas destined for countries that have a free trade agreement with the United States, such as Mexico and South Korea, don’t need that national interest finding.)

As with the proposed Keystone pipeline that would bring more Canadian oil down to the Gulf Coast, many environmental groups are pressuring the White House to hold back on approving gas exports. Both Keystone and gas exports would extend the reign of oil and gas as the nation’s primary energy sources. And gas exports would bring more hydraulic fracturing, which has become a bête noir among environmentalists because of concerns about groundwater, air quality and earthquakes.